Category: Six on the Wild Die

Meet the Marvels: Kieron Gillen

Posted on February 9, 2015by

marvels-gillencoverWe continue with our look back at representative works penned by the new writers of the Marvel Star Wars comics. Last time we looked at Jason Aaron, and now we are going to take a look at Kieron Gillen, writer of this week’s Darth Vader. Given that he’s writing one of the largest villains in the history of fiction, we’ll take a look at one of his most villainous series: the critically-acclaimed Journey Into Mystery.

In 2011, Gillen was already a popular author and was slowly becoming one of Marvel’s staples. Coming from the world of media journalism, his New Games Journalism manifesto had tried to adapt the new journalism model to the world of video games. His first real comic, outside of comic strips for video game magazines, was called Phonogram, a delicious mish-mash of pop sorcery, britpop and true love for anything pop that he authored alongside long-time collaborator Jamie McKelvie and that turned him into someone to keep an eye on. After writing some one-shots for Marvel, he co-authored comic books with well-established writers like Warren Ellis or Matt Fraction and eventually took the reins of the Thor comic book for ten issues. After a long and well-received stint in Uncanny X-Men, Gillen returned to Thor, but to everyone’s surprise the book was renamed to Journey Into Mystery (the name of the comic where Thor and the Asgardians first appeared) and, well, stopped being a Thor comic. Read More

The Expanded Universe Explains, Special Edition – The Inquisitorius

Posted on January 23, 2015by

The Inquisitor. The first Star Wars Rebels character the audience ever saw teased. The new bad guy in the building. The nameless Inquisitor appears as a merciless Jedi hunter on His Imperial Majesty’s service, wielding both considerable political power and a ridiculously kickass lightsaber and getting his orders straight from Lord Vader. The Inquisitor was actually the first new character in the new Star Wars canon, at least from a certain point of view. But this formidable darksider didn’t appear out of thin air: he’s actually an updated version of a very old Expanded Universe concept, of an old Expanded Universe character, even. So, where does he really come from? The concept of an Imperial Inquisition started as a completely unrelated one-off reference that over time would slowly morph from a sort of political police into a true army of the Emperor’s dark minions, not unlike the Knights of the Sith from the early Star Wars drafts.

The Imperial Inquisitors first appeared on the old West End Games roleplaying game, like most good things with the Expanded Universe (I’m just kidding –okay, I’m not). The first time we heard anything about Inquisitors was in the pages of one of the first books to try to describe the galaxy’s minutiae, The Star Wars Sourcebook (1987), and not even in a “Powerful Darksiders of the Empire” section or anything memorable like that. No, it was under “Assassin Droid”, where we can read an apparently random anecdote about an assassin droid that crashed a shuttle against the Imperial palace of Weerden, killing someone called “Lord Torbin, the Grand Inquisitor”. This character, later given the full name of Laddinare Torbin, was indeed our first Imperial Inquisitor, but the way the sourcebooks described him didn’t have much to do with the creepy dark side enforcer of Star Wars Rebels fame. Read More

Meet the Marvels: Jason Aaron

Posted on January 14, 2015by Six on the Wild Die

The first issue of Marvel’s new Star Wars ongoing is in stores today, and it seems like the Marvel announcement was just yesterday. There’s a certain mistrust among the hardcore fans about this comic’s quality and it’s easy to see why: Dark Horse Comics were a class act, one that is going to be hard to follow, and modern Marvel are an unknown quantity for a big chunk of the fandom.

Just who are these guys that are going to be headlining the new canon on a monthly basis in 2015? As we feel that most comic book fans are Star Wars fans, but not necessarily the other way around, we are going to profile a series of single issues penned by the authors of the new Marvel books (that’s what serious comic nerds call comics, “books”, get used to it). We are going to be spotlighting comics that we think could be the most representative of what to expect or, at least, the ones that feel closest to what their Star Wars book might end up being. And we are going to start with Jason Aaron and the first issue of Wolverine and the X-Men. Read More